The entrance to the cellar at Elizabeth House, the entry to a night club that had six different names over a period of 20 years.
When Elizabeth House was built on Great Moor Street in 1971
it was decided to lease the cellar premises to a company who wanted to open up
a nightclub. The Va Va club opened that year, the club’s name coming from the
French word for ‘go’ – The ‘Go Go’ club, in other words.
The Va Va became well-known throughout the north in 1973 for
its all-night northern soul sessions. Local DJ Wick Barrett (nowadays a civil
servant in Cardiff) invited another DJ, Richard Searling to help him out at the
12-hour sessions which began in April 1973. Richard had just returned from a
trip from Philadelphia and had brought back with him a large number of obscure
soul records and took up Wick’s offer. The first few hours at the Va Va’s
Friday night sessions would be the pop hits of the day followed at 1am by ‘rare
soul’ – the term which the genre later known as ‘Northern
Soul’ was initially known by – until the club closed at 8 the following morning.
The Va Va had a capacity of around 400 and by the summer of
that year was attracting around 300-400 people every Friday night from all over
the north of England, partly helped by the management advertising in Blues
& Soul magazine.
But as always seems to be the case in the case of night
clubs with what could be termed a ‘cult following’ drugs were instrumental in
its downfall.
As Richard Searling puts it: “During a casual look
around the club drugs were found and the management, quite understandably,
became worried about their relations with the Police who had discovered the
'Pills'. Nothing was said on that Friday
in August, but on the following Wednesday I received a phone call from the
manager saying that the Va-Va all-nighter was no more”. [1]
After just four months the all-night sessions were dead, but
for an event that lasted such a short space of time the sessions are still
fondly remembered. The Va Va is mentioned in the same breath as the King Mojo
in Sheffield, The Catacombs in Wolverhampton and the Room at the Top in Wigan
as clubs that helped pioneer Northern Soul and the club is remembered with a great deal
of affection both locally and by aficionados of the genre from further afield. A
simple Google search for ‘Va Va Bolton’ digs up a whole host of memories on blogs and forums from people who attended the events in those heady days of the summer of '73.
A month after the Va Va ended its Northern Soul
all-nighters, Wigan Casino began theirs. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Va Va endured two name changes before the seventies were
out as the owners went for a more mainstream audience and tried to compete with
other nightclubs in the town such as the Palais, Scamps and the
Cromwellian/Maxwell’s Plum. It changed its name to Pips nightclub and became
Rotters in 1978. However, it closed after a fire in 1979 and remained empty for
over a year.
In December 1980 the premises re-opened as Space City. The club licence had gone but Space City promoted itself as a pool hall and amusement arcade specialising in ‘space invader’ games that had recently become popular.
The popularity of ‘space invaders’ began to wane as the
eighties wore on and in the summer of 1984 Space City’s management began to put
on heavy rock discos following the demise of rock nights in the Swan Hotel’s
cellar bar the previous year. It was a strange choice. While the Swan’s cellar
was dank and wet the inside of Space City still looked like the trendy
nightclub it had been in the seventies complete with mirrors and disco balls.
Even so, the Space City rock disco ran for four years until the venue's owner Roy Savage sold up
in 1988. Like the Northern Soul events over a decade earlier, the rock nights are still remembered affectionately by those who were there, but the rockers moved on to yet another cellar bar, Sundowners in
Mawdesley Street (later J2 and now Level) where they remained – in a club re-named Sparrow’s in 1989- for the next eight years.
The premises that once housed Va Va and Space City then
became High Society, before being renamed the Kiss night spot from 1992 and Club
Liquid in 1997. This closed soon after the turn of the millennium.
Moves were afoot around 2004 to re-commence rock
nights in the Elizabeth House cellar, but police objections centred around the
manning of resources away from the Bradshawgate/Deansgate area and it looks
unlikely ever to re-open as licensed premises.
The Bolton Council list of empty properties as at September 2014 has Heineken UK Ltd as its owners.
[1] Rumworth Soul Club. Accessed 17 April 2014.
[2] Wikipedia entry for Northern Soul. Accessed 17 April 2014.
